A Guide to Blitz BASIC - Neil Wright

[jonesypeter]

For a while now I've been trying to get to grips with Blitz BASIC. I struggled with the manual, and the only independent book (by Neil Wright) seems to be vapourware.

Anyway, I came across two disks from F1 Licenceware (F1-136A, and F1-136B) which contain A Guide to Blitz Basic in AmigaGuide format.

With the combination of a Windows tool called AGWV which converts AmigaGuide files to TXT, Visual Studio Code, MarkDown (Which is for styling text files), and a tool to export Markdown to PDF, I present the 'The Basics' chapter.

I hope others find it useful. If you do, please let me know and I will with the rest of the guides.

Please let me know of any encoding issues in my conversion from TXT to Markdown. Some characters have to be escaped to avoid them coming out as emojis.

The Google Drive folder contains the original disks, and the first chapter in MarkDown and PDF formats.

Peter


https://drive.google.com/drive/folde...as?usp=sharing

[fxgogo]

You wonderful person you. Thanks a stack.

[Nightshft]

Very nice! Looking forward to the next chapters.

[jonesypeter]

Thanks for the positive comments. I will post here as I complete chapters and may well take up the offer of assistance. Cheers.

[AlfaRomeo]

Very thanks for your work

[jonesypeter]

Chapter 2 - String Functions, is now available at the same link as above.

[aNdy/AL/COS]

Very useful, thanks!

[jonesypeter]

Chapter 3 is now available. This time we cover Maths. Only two more chapters to go before we get onto the exiting stuff!

[MickGyver]

Nice! Thank you for doing this!

[Daedalus]

Yep, this is pretty cool indeed, nice work!

[Graham Humphrey]

This is excellent, thank you!

[Havie]

I spent many years searching for the books and finally concluded that it didn't exist. What you have done here is amazing and deserves to be made into a book as I for one, like to have book in hand whilst I program. Thank you and if there is anything I can do to help - please pm!

[MickGyver]

Originally Posted by jonesypeter

Chapter 3 is now available. This time we cover Maths. Only two more chapters to go before we get onto the exiting stuff!

How many chapters are there?

[MickGyver]

To make the PDF export more book-like with increased margins, justified paragraphs and a larger font-size (resulting in less words per row), I edited the settings of the markdown-pdf extension to this:

.vsode/settings.json

{
    "markdown-pdf.displayHeaderFooter": false,
    "markdown-pdf.emoji": false,
    "markdown-pdf.margin.left": "1.5cm",
    "markdown-pdf.margin.right": "1.5cm",
    "markdown-pdf.margin.bottom": "1.5cm",
    "markdown-pdf.stylesRelativePathFile": true,
    "markdown-pdf.styles": [
        "markdown-pdf.css"
    ]
}

markdown-pdf.css

p {
    text-align: justify;
}

The result can be seen in the attachment.

[aNdy/AL/COS]

Looks good!

[cz101]

thanks jonesypeter and MickGyver.
If you don't mind, I took a stab at converting and merging the remaining chapters into something printable. In the zone now. Hopefully text didn't get lost or messed up in the process but it's a possibility.

It's really only another reference guide though. Good tutorials much more useful now I think.
A good, even excellent, one for example is Rob Cranley's in Amiga Future magazine. Deserves really to be also converted into something more accessible and printable

[AlfaRomeo]

Great!! Many thanks to all of you that worked on this printable guide

[Havie]

I wonder if this is basically the mythical book?

[Nightshft]

This became a very nice and professional looking "book" now! Awesome work guys!

[Cobe]

Nice work of course.

But does this book contain anything that wasnt available already?
I've just read Aga chapter and nothing new, seems like copy/paste, even missing some stuff...